Web Guidelines

Page Content

The Trinity College Web site is an online means of communicating a wide variety of information about the College to a diversified audience, including prospective students. It represents the identity and image of the College, and reinforces the mission and values of Trinity. In order to present a consistent and uniform Web impression, the College provides and encourages the use of a content management system. The majority of official College Web content is published via this system.

The purpose of the Web guidelines below is to ensure that all official Web pages representing the College consistently reflect Trinity's quality and image. It is the responsibility of each department or office that maintains its individual section of the College site to follow the content, navigation, and design guidelines as described below.

Content/Navigation Standards

Official logo headers must be used as laid out in the templates, including the global links bar as well as the "logo" link back to the home page. If content management templates are not being used for pages within a department site, the individually designed Web page must use the official College logo as a link back to the home page.

Contact information, or a link to contact information, must be prominently displayed on the landing page of each individual department or office site.

A title describing the content of each page must be prominently displayed at the page top.

All pages must have clear and effective navigational links to get back to the home page or to the landing page of the department or office site. Please note that your site landing page URL should always begin with www.trincoll.edu/, followed by the path to your site location within the overall College site.

Duplication of content from other departments and offices must be avoided. Instead, provide links to existing content. This will ensure accuracy and consistency of content.

Broken links or dead-end destinations must be avoided.

Any links that take the Web visitor off a Trinity site page to an external site or to a non-office page (e.g., individual home pages) must open in another window.

All Trinity College Web sites/pages are expected to follow legal and copyright laws regarding content, including the use of photographs, artwork, audiovisual materials, and other intellectual property.

Design Standards:

The content management system (CMS) uses the following Markup Styles: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and Paragraph. Within the CMS, the appropriate Markup Style should be applied to the text rather than formatting text in other ways. The font information is detailed below:

Graphics must have meaningful descriptions entered (will display as alternate text tags), and must include height and width attributes. All photos/graphics should not exceed 400 pixels in width and be low-resolution (72 dpi).

Overloading a page with photos should be avoided, as this could considerably slow the page download time. It is strongly recommended that no more than one or two photos be used on a Web page. (If you do have several photos you want to post online, a “photo gallery” Web page that opens up in another window should be utilized.)

To maintain visual attractiveness, please use formatting (bold, italics, colors, etc.) judiciously. Web pages must not use technology that interferes with the navigation or significantly hinders download times.